Out of Darkness

by Ashley Hope Pérez

  A skinny spotted dog ran out in front of the truck. He braked and veered, barely missing it. When he looked up, he saw her, plain as day.

  Estella.

  He recognized her first by her braid, then by the easy music of her walk. She was headed away from him on the plank sidewalk, a basket in one hand. Then she turned around, and he saw that it wasn’t Estella. The girl was far too young and shades darker. And of course there was the obvious: it couldn’t be Estella because Estella had been dead for nearly eight years.

  It was the girl. She recognized him, he knew. Her dark eyes widened; her lips parted. A shadow crossed her face, and she took a step toward the truck.

  NAOMI Naomi looked up from the shirt she was patching to see the twins hovering in the doorway from the hall.

  “Now what?” she asked. It was raining out, and the twins had been moping around all afternoon.

  Cari blew air into her bangs. Beto wandered to the stove and lifted the lid from a casserole dish. “What is this?” he asked.

  “Chicken and rice,” Naomi said. “Daddy brought home some nice bright green beans, too.”

  “But what’s for dessert?” Cari asked.

  Naomi frowned. “Some sweet oranges a neighbor sent over yesterday,” she said. “A treat.”

  “Some treat,” Cari grumbled.

  “How about cake? Cake is nice,” Beto said.

  Naomi stabbed her needle deep into the pincushion and stared at the twins. A week ago they would have been grateful there was supper.

  Their grandparents’ store had the best fruit on the West Side of San Antonio. Bright limes and lemons and speckled oranges for juicing. Grapefruits you could smell across the room. Mangoes so firm and sweet they made pregnant women weep. Strawberries like fleshy hearts, mounded in little baskets. Peaches and nectarines dusted with a careful hand. But all this was reserved for customers.

  “What we eat, we can’t sell,” Abuelita always said, and she only allowed Abuelito to bring home unsellable items. Split watermelons, ripped sacks of cornmeal, cucumbers gone soft or moldy in places.

  “Come sit at the table,” Naomi said to the twins. “We’re going to write to everybody back home.”

  “Do we write in English or Spanish?” Cari asked.

  Naomi shrugged. “There’s no rule against writing in Spanish. It’s up to you.” Spanish was a talking and singing language as far as she was concerned, but when Abuelito had finished teaching the twins to write in English, they’d begged him to show them what was different in Spanish. They’d caught on right away, like they did with everything, and he showed off the flawless signs that the twins lettered in Spanish for the store.

  Beto decided to write to Abuelito in English, and Cari wrote to Abuelita in Spanish. Naomi started a letter to her cousin Josefina. “Dear Fina,” she began. She wrote the usual things, printing out each word carefully. When she finished, she looked over the letter and signed it. Hers was only a half dozen sentences. She glanced at the twins, who were still writing, their pencils stitching words together like bits of lace. The Mexican schools didn’t teach cursive, but one of the twins’ teachers had taken an interest and shown them.

  Naomi left her letter on the table, got up, and went to light the stove. Henry had warned her about the raw gas. Usually it was fine, he said, but it could flare up fast since the pressure wasn’t steady. She bent down with her match, lit the gas, and stepped quickly back. When she was sure of the blue line of flame, she finished her sewing and started in on the last preparations for dinner. She looked for a heavy pan to fry the green beans, but she couldn’t find one. She needed to hurry; after dinner, there was still cleaning to do. First, the bathroom. She suspected that it hadn’t been cleaned once since Henry moved in, and maybe not before that. Small dark hairs flecked the sink basin, and dust was gathering in the grout lines between the tiles. She had to figure out what to do about the bathtub drain, too. Greenish water lines ringed the tub from where the water sat for hours before finally going down.

  She was sliding the casserole dish into the oven when the laughing started. Every time she turned around, the twins lowered their heads and acted like they were writing.

  “What’s funny?” she asked, walking over to the table.

  “Nothing,” snorted Cari. She tucked her chin into her neck and pulled the corners of her mouth down, but still the smile twitched back up. She held Naomi’s letter in her hand. It trembled with her suppressed laughter. “I’m ... hopping you are fine!” she said, exploding into giggles.

  Beto pressed his hand over his mouth and gasped with laughter.

  Naomi’s heart accelerated. She felt her face go hot, but her tongue was heavy in her mouth. She put her back to them and waited. When they stopped laughing, she turned and picked up her letter from the table. “Put your letters on the counter. We’ll ask Daddy to mail them tomorrow.” She did not look at them.

  Then she got out the green beans and began trimming them. Each thunk of the knife rang out loud in the silence of the kitchen.

  THE GANG We knew she was a Mexican the second we saw her standing there behind Tommie in the doorway of our senior homeroom. It rolled off her in waves. Like when someone’s been slopping pigs or digging around sewer lines. She wasn’t the first in the school; oil field trash blew into town all year long, and a few greasers had come and gone from the lower grades, but we’d never had one in our class before.

  We craned our necks. Some of us caught a glimpse of her, but most of us had trouble seeing around Tommie. Tommie Kinnebrew was also new, and we’d learned her name against our will by the sheer force of her gab on the first day of school. Her talk followed us in the halls and filled our ears like our little brother’s tom-tom, which is to say, unbearable. A couple of the guys—Chigger Watson with his pimpled hands and also Josiah Pleaton—were of the private opinion that even if Tommie talked too much and had some bacon on her, she did have tits. But most of us just wished she would move out of the way, especially now since we wanted to get a better look at the Mexican girl who had missed the first two days of school.

  Those of us in the back who could see reported to those in the front. Clothes and dirt and scandal for the girls. For the boys, pussy or the idea of pussy or the idea of the idea of pussy.

  “This here is Naomi Smith,” said Tommie, taking a step into the room and talking loud over the whispers. She waved the Mexican girl’s enrollment slip like a winning bingo card and trotted to the front of the room. Mrs. Simmons took the card and motioned the girl to come to her desk. But still she stayed back. We all turned to stare. It was plain that she wanted to be invisible, but no amount of wishing was going to stop us from noticing her, not even in that faded dress and ratty cardigan. Even the girls had to admit that, Mexican or not, old clothes or not, she was prettier than any girl in school. Elliott Grovener whistled. Dot Miller hissed back, “Go on, catch yourself a disease.”

  Some of us could be jealous, and the greenest of all was Miranda Gibbler. None of us liked Miranda; all of us pretended to. She was ugly and had spite enough to poison the whole town. But what mattered was her daddy’s money. “A Mexican is a Mexican is a Mexican,” she said, plenty loud for the rest of us to hear. The girls among us followed Miranda’s lead and began to tally flaws. Clothes from five years ago, a braid long out of style. Patch on the back hem of her dress. And also: how come her name is Smith when Smith isn’t Mexican? Look at her, making eyes at Fred Carter, not wasting any time.

  The boys among us had no trouble getting past the plain clothes and laying down plans. Take her out back, we boys figured, then: hand on the titties; put it in her coin box; put it in her cornhole; grab a hold of that braid; rub that calico. The nicer boys among us thought, buy her ice cream first; dance with her once or twice?

  “Looking for the cigar factory?” Miranda said when the Mexican girl walked past on her way to the one empty seat at the front of the room. Miranda raised her eyebrows at Vanessa and Gladys and Betty Lee. They laughed. Some of us
joined in.

  Most of us couldn’t see the Mexican girl’s face from where we sat. Still we wondered, could Mexicans blush?

  BETO All around Beto, sweating pink faces nodded to the rhythm of murmured and hollered amens. The preacher paced and shouted at the front of the tent, coming close to the revival crowd then veering back behind the plywood podium.

  “The wages of sin is death!” he shouted with his fist raised high. Sweat rolled down his face. His dark beard and sharp cheekbones made him look like the cards with Jesus and the martyred saints that Abuelita pinned to the wall around her altar.

  Beto was afraid to blink, desperate for the answer, desperate to know how to be safe. How to be saved. Terror swelled inside him, and he clutched the fan someone had given him. Beside him, Naomi held her shoulders back, swaying a little. Her fan lay abandoned in her lap. Henry’s eyes were fixed on the preacher. Cari was tracking a fly, clearly bored. How did she not see that they were in danger?

  “The wages of sin is death, are they not, my brothers?” This time the preacher whispered the words, closing his eyes as if in pain.

  “Amen!” voices in the crowd called together.

  “But the gift of the Lord—is eternal life! Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, young and old: we are all sinners, every one!” The words thundered out at them.

  “Yes we are!” a woman shouted.

  “We’re born drinkers and gamblers, profaners and idolaters, liars and thieves, all hateful in the sight of the Lord, every one of us, down to the smallest.” He pointed a trembling finger at a fat blonde baby sucking on her fist. “We deserve death!” The words rang out over the sweating congregation, and Beto’s pulse pounded in his ears. “But if we confess our sins, we can be saved! By the blood of the lamb, we can be saved! By his death on the cross, we can be saved! Washed in his blood, we become clean!”

  Cries of “Amen!” filled the tent. The preacher swabbed his red face with a handkerchief. A bread loaf of a woman wearing a small hat began to hum. Her rich alto filled the tent.

  “Come forth and be cleansed,” the preacher said, his voice gentle now. “Come and be saved. Now is the time! You think it’s hot tonight? The fires of hell are hot, but God’s grace is a soothing balm! Come now, brothers and sisters. Come and pray with me.”

  A few people moved slowly toward the front. More followed until almost a dozen were kneeling with the small man in his damp suit. He went to them one by one, whispering in their ears, waiting for their responses, praying over them. Then he shouted, “Who else has heard the call? Is there anyone else?”

  “Me,” Beto whispered, “me.” He caught Cari’s eye, wanting this to be the thing that they shared, but she shook her head. The preacher reached a hand out toward him, waving him forward. Beto slipped past the stout legs of the mothers on their bench and climbed over their squirming babies to get to the aisle. And then he was inside the hot circle of prayer at the front, and the preacher’s hands were pressing a prayer down onto his shoulders, telling him he was a sinner, and Jesus was his Savior, and he was washed in blood, and there was the promise of forgiveness, and most of all he would be saved, saved, saved. A throng of bodies carried him out of the tent and toward the river. He was glad because the river was the outward sign and he needed the outward sign to have the Spirit, and he needed the Spirit to know he was safe.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Eyes shut tight, tipped back into darkness, icy currents against his face. Then Beto was lifted up out of the water. The late-afternoon sun streamed warm and gold around him like a second baptism. Water came down his face and dripped from his chin, and the shivers were happiness and safety. He could not wait to see his daddy.

  As they waded back to the shore, the preacher asked Beto where his sister was. When Beto pointed her out, the pastor began to wave and call to her. “Join your brother in the army of the Lord! Pray the redemption prayer and be freed from sin!”

  Cari crossed her arms, but at least she was singing along with everyone else. Beto tried to figure how to explain to Cari and Naomi that they must go into the water, that it had to be now because later might be too late.

  A lady handed him a towel, and then Naomi was there, looking sad as usual. His daddy was smiling, and Beto just knew that he was going to hug him, but then the preacher came up and started shaking Henry’s hand.

  “At last!” the preacher said. He reached out a hand to Naomi next. “I’m Pastor Tom. We’ve all been praying and waiting and hoping to meet y’all. Welcome to New London.”

  “You already met Robbie. Here’s his sister, Carrie.” The names stretched long in Henry’s mouth.

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance,” Cari said in the sweet, singsong voice that meant she didn’t like someone.

  “The oldest here is Naomi,” Henry said.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” Naomi said.

  Pastor Tom clapped a hand onto Henry’s back. “Didn’t I tell you, brother? You steered straight, and your Savior Jesus Christ rewarded your efforts. A family brought together, and another soldier for the Lord! Now let’s get over there and have some of Mrs. Clarkson’s fried chicken and pie.”

  Beto, suddenly starving, followed the preacher toward the picnic tables under a stand of oaks, but all along the way they had to stop and meet church ladies. “My son, Robbie,” Beto heard his daddy say over and over, and he tried to think of himself that way. It was hard but not too hard. Cari stood stiff beside him through the introductions, and Beto wanted to tell her the thing that would make her happy, but he didn’t know how. He scanned the ground and the trees and tried to see what might make her understand.

  He did not like the women who reached out and touched him with their gloved hands or the ones that leaned down to kiss him, bumping his head with their wide hats.

  Then a woman with nice gray eyes and a heart-shaped face and a baby on her hip came and rescued them from the other ladies. A little boy in cowboy boots followed her. His mouth was stained purple.

  “Y’all gonna try my fried chicken and blueberry pie?” the lady asked. “J.R., you say good evening.” The boy stuck out a sticky hand for them to shake, and the baby grinned and drooled some more.

  “This is Mrs. Muffy Clarkson,” his daddy said. “She and her husband Bud, they’ve been real good to me.”

  Muff was their neighbor, and while they ate the fried chicken and mounds of potato salad and fluffy white biscuits, she talked about people that she knew, people his daddy knew, too. People that he and Cari would know because now this was their home. She told them how Pastor Tom was the best thing that ever happened to this oil field. She talked them right to the bottom of their plates and through a round of seconds, but when a stink came up from the baby’s diaper, Muff sighed and held him away from her dress.

  “That’s our cue,” she said. “Sure was nice meeting you all. Listen, Naomi, you mind getting my blueberry pie tin when the picnic’s all over? It’s on a red dishcloth. Has a Clabber Girl stamp on the inside.”

  Naomi managed a nod, and then Muff hurried toward the cars with J.R. clomping after her. After that, Beto watched Henry walk off to talk to some men smoking at the edge of the parked cars, mostly out of sight of the ladies. It was just Beto and Naomi and Cari left at the table then. He was still looking for the chance to tell them what he needed to say, but he also didn’t know what that was, and so he settled for a big piece of the blueberry pie and also some cake with pineapple on top.

  After they’d cleared off all the dishes, Naomi said they could go play. Beto tried and tried to get her to come climb trees with them. Naomi could climb a tree better than anyone. But she said no, and so he trailed Cari toward a group of kids. The bright taste of blueberry and pineapple lasted for a moment, and then all that was left was the mystery of being saved.

  NAOMI Naomi watched the twins play until some of the church ladies started drifting in her direction. She did not want to meet another Miss Glenda Fae Hawkins or Miss Susannah Sally Peters, had no desire to
face their smiles and clucking and gloved hands. Some inquired about “eye-talians” in her mother’s family. Others did not, but their faces were pinched with the strain of not asking, not saying.

  She considered waiting in Henry’s truck, away from the dressed-up chickens that would peck and peck at her until they found something tasty. But the men were smoking over there, so the woods seemed like a better escape. She hurried in that direction.

  It was cooler under the trees. High in the branches, tree frogs sang shrill serenatas. The sharp, clean scent of pine was in the air. Naomi stepped off of the path, leaned against the smooth trunk of an ash tree, and slid down to sit at its base. She put her mind on the small things in the brush. If she focused on all the little lives creeping and fluttering and scurrying around her, she wouldn’t have to feel what she was feeling.

  Which was mostly betrayal. She was losing Beto already. He was hungry for Henry’s attention. She wondered if Abuelito and Abuelita knew this would happen—and if they would care. She didn’t get to have an opinion; they had sent her here without once asking what she thought.

  Even when Abuelito had sensed that something was wrong, it hadn’t mattered. “Don’t you see it’s for the best?” he had said that last night in San Antonio. He’d reached out a trembling, spotted hand and guided her over to the bed she shared with Beto and Cari. He pulled his chair close and laid his dry palm gently against her cheek. “This is for you, too, mi corazon. I want you to go to the big school. They must let you, you see? None of this...” He pulled his hand back and waved it through the air to sum up all the ways the San Antonio schools kept Mexican students apart from whites. The too-small primary schools and the split grades that meant Mexican kids were always and forever behind. The “Mexican wing” of Crockett High School, which was really five dank and crowded basement rooms that no white student ever entered. Abuelito’s excitement swept him along. “You will give the twins this opportunity, ¿verdad? And you will go to the school?”